Awhile back, in the Things I Don’t Miss comments, some people remarked they didn’t miss floppies. Not me. I do miss them.

No, it has nothing to do with the quality of the games back then. It’s the very floppies themselves. We didn’t have to worry about viruses, trojans, or malware. There was no paranoia about programs “phoning home” and sending who knows what information. Life was easier for one simple reason: no hard drive.

There was no place, really, for any crapware to go, and not much any of it could do. Every program, at least on the Apple, required a reboot of the system. Put in a floppy, reboot. Done? Take it out, put in something else, reboot.

And, of course, floppies could be write-protected, although that was more to prevent inadvertantly formatting a disk with data on it than anything else.

Once the IBM-PC and its many clones took over the market, that all changed. Now we had hard drives. In the beginning, the drives, though they were tiny compared to today, had lots of room.

Even so, programs still came on floppies. That included any number of utility apps and small, shareware/freebie games available from BBS’ and networks like CompuServe. Stuff easy to pass around to friends on disk, and now, easy to carry malignant software.

It’s been all downhill from there. Today, we need firewalls, virus scanners, malware scanners, and patches galore to plug security holes in our browsers. Hard drives brought us convenience, but they also brought a lot of headaches.

So yeah, I miss floppies. I miss them a lot.

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They weren’t immune though. I am not sure about Apple, but the PC, Atari ST, and Amiga had boot sector viruses that would affect floppies, and the next time you did a warm boot it would infect the next floppy too. I remember one on the Atari that wasn’t damaging, just annoying. It inverted the mouse up and down motion but left and right were unchanged. Michalangelo was a floppy boot sector virus for the PC that activated on Michalangelo’s birthday. It would overwrite data on the floppy or hard drive since it could be passed on to the boot sector of a hard drive too.

I think a lot of today’s problems are more due to always on connections and networking. Windows was originally made to be a single user environment and exposing it to a global network left it wide open for vectors of attack that the designers didn’t plan for at all. Unix, OS X, and Linux were designed from the start to be a multiuser platform, so there are a lot less issues with them.

What’s interesting was that I kinda missed the era from 1987 – 1991. Between my senior year of high school, college, and church service, I really didn’t play many computer games. In fact, I didn’t really have a computer then. I played games on friends’ machines. That was how I discovered Dungeon Master and the Pool of Radiance, as a matter of fact…

I finally did get a computer – my first since my old Commodore 64 – just before I got married. A 386/SX-16 homebrew my father-in-law-to-be helped me put together. And a hand-me-down 40 meg hard drive.

And I was astonished. I was used to 256k floppies. That machine could hold something like 160 floppies on its hard drive! I wasn’t sure if I’d ever had that many floppies for the C-64!

I was equally astonished to see how quickly it filled up. Within a year I had added an 80 meg hard drive to the 40, and those Origin games (specifically Wing Commander I + expansions, Wing Commander II + expansions, Ultima VII Part I, Ultima Underworld, and Ultima V) took up most of the room all by themselves!!!

Interstel dropped this bomb, the sequel to the excellent STAR FLEET, in 1989.

It was by far a worse game than Master of Orion 3, both in terms of wrecking a good franchise and being craptacular in its own right (wrong?).

Beware of abandonware sites like HOTU which praise this game. STAR FLEET was outstanding but SF2 was a flaming train wreck from hell with zombie ninjas. On crack. Hell crack.

I bought and (shudder) played this thing and I remember it well.

The game was so buggy and broken that Interstel had to distribute something like a DOZEN rounds of patches. Keep in mind that ‘patches’ in 1989 meant sending out actual floppies and printed instruction sheets as opposed to posting some BBS or FTP file for people to grab.

You can imagine the financial impact of this on a small game software company. Now imagine going through it over and over again with no end in sight.

Add to this an inferno of negative word-of-mouth, retailer and game press publicity and… well, SF2 pretty much wrecked Interstel.

Worse, the game never did get entirely fixed. The entire planetside segment, which players could not access, was pulled from SF2 and re-released as the standalone title STAR LEGIONS by Mindcraft in 1992.

One wonders if Interstel could have survived – and they did deserve to survive – had they been able to handle patches and customer support electronically.